The other McCarthy: Sort of clean for Gene

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
Senator Eugene McCarthy, who died last Saturday at the age of 89,
was, except for a few brief months in 1968, considered an eccentric
at best, a pariah at worst, by his fellow Democrats. He was
consigned to the same cage as Jerry Brown, absent the California
costume changes. I didn’t agree with McCarthy on numerous
issues as the decades piled on, even though he endorsed Ronald
Reagan over the detestable Jimmy Carter in 1980, but he was
certainly one of the five most fascinating politicians of the past
40 years. (Lest you youngsters forget, Neil Young was also, for a
brief period, a Reagan booster in the ’80s.)

Like many teenagers in ’68, I was rooting for McCarthy in the
still boss-controlled Democratic presidential nomination process,
and it was his candidacy that led me to quit the Boy Scouts that
year. At a Troop 12 meeting in Huntington one May evening, I defiled
the uniform by wearing one of those cool blue and white McCarthy
campaign buttons, and received a severe tongue-lashing from the
idiotic Eagle Scout who presided over the inspection of the ranks.
My affiliation with the Boy Scouts during the late ’60s,
didn’t exactly raise my hippie cred factor at school, but my
four brothers had all been members and it was considered a suitable
extracurricular activity for future college applications.

But after that incident, I said to hell with the Scouts,
Baden-Powell, “Be Prepared,” and overnight hikes in the
Catskills. Within my circle of acquaintances at junior high school,
you were either for McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy, with no room to
“agree to disagree.”

I was disgusted at Kennedy’s entrance into the race just days
after McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary,
a stunning event that led LBJ to quit politics, and while
RFK’s assassination that June was tragic  if
not for the nation, certainly his wife and children 
it led to all sorts of revisionism about the
Sophocles-spouting senator. Lost in all the hagiography of Kennedy
mingling with the underprivileged and fruit-pickers in California
was his splintering the anti-war movement’s momentum by
cynically challenging McCarthy after he’d promised to stay on
the sidelines. In retrospect, a better choice would’ve been to
wait till 1972 or ‘76  he might still be
alive  but Kennedy, displaying the dirty,
money-fueled politics of his family, just couldn’t
resist.

Small wonder that McCarthy remained bitter about the ’68
campaign for the rest of his life.

Martin Nolan, a onetime Boston Globe Washington correspondent, had a
splendid anecdote about McCarthy in his former paper this past
Monday. He wrote: “Bobby Kennedy even doubted
[McCarthy’s] Irishness. Fixing me with his blue eyes, he
earnestly told me, ‘Gene’s not all Irish, you
know.’ ‘You’re kidding, Senator,’ I
protested. ‘You sound like a guy from South Boston smearing an
opponent who might be Lithuanian or Canadian.’
‘I’m serious,” RFK said. ‘Gene’s
mother was German. That’s why he’s so mean.’
‘What’s your excuse?’ I asked. Kennedy blushed
with embarrassment.”

As it happened, I spent a couple of hours with McCarthy as a college
reporter in the fall of 1975. He’d just given a standard
speech at Johns Hopkins  making the university
tour ahead of his quixotic ’76 presidential campaign
 and later at his hotel I was able, after a manipulative
question about Yeats, to pique his interest and settle down with a
few cocktails. He offered several subtle yet devastating anecdotes
about Hubert Humphrey  the polar opposite of
Hunter Thompson’s frequent burn-him-at-the-stake appraisals of
Johnson’s veep  and then McCarthy, bored
talking politics, spent the remainder of our time analyzing, game by
game, the epic ’75 World Series.

I’ve interviewed many offbeat politicians 
Fred Harris, Bill Weld, Jerry Brown and Ed Koch come to
mind  but McCarthy was far and away the most
eclectic, intellectual and fun. It’s testament to the short
shrift he’s received from journalists and historians that last
Sunday his obituary was placed below that of comedian Richard Pryor
by several major dailies.

One of those dailies, The Baltimore Sun, took advantage of
McCarthy’s death to moralize about the Iraq war. In a loopy
Dec. 12 editorial, this was the conclusion: “The war in
Vietnam dragged on, but after 1968 its unpopularity, though
unprecedented, was a given. Today America is fighting another war of
uncertain purpose. The loss of life and the loss of material goods
in Iraq are not so costly as in Vietnam days, as painful as they
are. But the loss of what Senator McCarthy called moral integrity
and moral energy is if anything worse now than it was in 1968, and
the eventual cost is incalculable. America awaits its McCarthy
moment.”

I’ve no idea who would represent that “McCarthy
moment,” perhaps Sen. Russell Feingold, but The Sun is correct
on one score. A hasty exit from Iraq could lead to more murderous
attacks on American and Israeli soil, and those costs, would indeed,
be “incalculable.”

HENRY LUCE'S TEARS
No matter how dispiriting, and superfluous, the contents of Time
become, each year my second oldest brother and I make a
gentleman’s bet on who the editors will pick as “Person
of the Year.” In a non-presidential year without a single
defining event, the choice is up for grabs, and the gossip columns
and websites have predicted, probably accurately, that “Mother
Nature” will grace the final Time cover of 2005. You know,
tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes and floods, as if they were all
invented in the past 12 months.

I’d like to see Howard Dean’s mug on the mag. What other
individual has done as much harm to the Democratic Party’s
longshot chances to take over both the House and Senate in the
midterm elections next year? Maybe Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid would
make a convincing runner-up, but it’s Dean who ought to get
fired immediately if the party wants Rep. Rahm Emanuel’s
pragmatic work on behalf of House candidates to bear any fruit. And
what a visual could be used: In the current GOP web attack ad
against the “white flag” Dems, there’s a shot of
Dean (showcased for two days on Drudge last week) looking like a
twin of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Hey, it could be great synergy
(bringing a word out of the mothballs), if Time chooses George
Clooney’s utterly confusing and muddled film Good Night, and
Good Luck as a 2005 cultural watershed.

There is, of course, a very justified choice the Time editors could
make if they wanted to erase the past 25 years and remain true to
Henry Luce’s original vision for the gimmick. Immigrants,
illegal or otherwise, made the most news and promise to be as
contentious an issue next year as the Iraq War. When Wall Street
Journal columnist Peggy Noonan goes Nativist (Dec. 8), nearly
joining the Minutemen and signing up to work for Pat Buchanan and
Tom Tancredo, in complete contradiction of that paper’s
staunch pro-immigration editorial views, that’s an indication
of how volatile the question is.